Chuck Has His Cake and Eats It Too

One of this Thinker’s pass-times is serving as Uber driver for teen grandchildren who attend Jenks Middle School, so this past week involved more trips down South Lewis Avenue and time in far south Tulsa than this mid-towner is used to.  The highlights of the week were granddaughter’s carrot cake:

And grandson’s attack by a rat snake on the banks of the Arkansas River.

The grandchildren and I decided that Monday we will go to the Capitol and join the effort to get back to our old lives.

So it is a bit of serendipity that my attention was called to a post by Representative Chuck Strohm at http://chuckstrohm.com/inside-the-captiol/   I doubt Strohm will have time to meet with my progeny, but it will be good conversation on the drive to OKC to share with them what I’ve learned about their state representative.  You see, turns out he had the “courage” to vote for the teacher pay raise, but not for the tax increases that will pay for it.

His post, ostensibly about his dismay when a constituent asked him ‘What can we pray about so that the legislature is willing to fix the injustice that has been done to our teachers.’, is really a lightly informed effort to justify his obvious attempt to have his cake and eat it too.   Here are the questions he attempts to answer, interspersed with my commentary: 

What is the injustice he was talking about?  If this misunderstood representative had also voted to pay for the funding that makes the teacher pay raise possible, I’d give him lots of love, along with his colleagues who truly merit it, because, after a full decade of stagnant salary schedules, Oklahoma’s teachers definitely deserve and need the increase.  The three-fourths majority in both houses of the legislature and Governor Fallin who had the political courage to do the right thing certainly surprised this Thinker.   It was an awesome, historic accomplishment for our state and public education.   The only “injustice” here is that Representative Strohm gets to campaign for reelection touting his vote for the teacher pay raise out of one side of his mouth while using the other to tout his votes against the taxes that pay for it.

Who sets teachers’ salaries?  Strohm tries to get legalistic here saying that because “actual” teacher salaries are determined by local school boards, “if you are unhappy with your salaries, your fight should be with them.”  I suppose if he was your landlord and you had no heat because he hadn’t paid the gas bill, he’d tell you, “it’s the gas company that turns your gas on and off, if you are unhappy, your fight should be with them.”  When it comes to teacher salaries the revenue available to school districts is determined by our state constitution and the legislature.  Without increased funding from property tax growth or sources controlled by the legislature, teacher pay raises are only possible if a school districts cuts expenditures for something else.   Maybe Strohm will help the Jenks Public Schools Board pay its teachers even more by using his math skills to delineate exactly where the money is to come from.  

Do all districts pay the minimum salary schedule?  Strohm says, “Absolutely not! The narrative that all Oklahoma schools pay the minimum is simply not true. No one is allowed to pay less and many pay more.  That is the trouble with minimum wages, instead of allowing the free market to set teacher salaries through competition, we have a minimum wage mindset that keeps wages low.”    I can’t tell you the joy this brought to my heart.  You see Strohm is an engineer and I come from a family of engineers—grandfather, father, uncles, brother, all were engineers.  I was the rebel who studied economics (partly redeemed by having an engineer daughter).  If Strohm would take a minute to read what conservative economists have to say about the impact of a minimum wage on labor markets, or a half minute to look up the definition of “minimum”, he’d have a good laugh at his own expense.  First, duh, you don’t enact a minimum wage to keep wages low, rather a minimum wage is intended to increase wages above a market level that is deemed too low.  Basic economic analysis shows that a minimum wage, set above the market wage, will cause a surplus, i.e. unemployment, in that labor market.  So if Oklahoma’s minimum salary schedule is indeed effective, what we would see are lots of quality applicants for teaching positions throughout the state—not.    

Does Strohm support a Teacher Pay Raise?   Yep, we already know this.  He likely supports everything government does that is good, as long as he doesn’t have to vote for or pay the taxes that support it. 

How much does a teacher pay raise actually cost?   The good engineer, having learned that a $1000 teacher pay raise, for the almost 50,000 who would receive it, costs about $57 million, has concluded that if you didn’t know that also, you must be a socialist—seriously. 

Details about the Pay Raise from last week:   Here he partly redeems himself by pointing out that the pay raise he supported, but won’t pay for, will help make our state more competitive in attracting and retaining good teachers.

A little math…. and who is telling the truth?   He says, “The problem with engineers is that we actually run the numbers rather than just believing what we are told.  So, let’s do a little math.”  He then calculates the student/teacher ratio to be 16.3 and concludes:  “Teachers have been telling me all week that they have 28 – 30 kids per classroom, yet the NEA data says we have 16.3 kids per classroom. I would say we have a problem.”   Yes, and the problem is this legislator doesn’t understand the legislative mandates that require lower class sizes for many classes, such as special education and early childhood and the engineer doesn’t understand that 16.3 is an average so that the 28 students in the 5^th grade regular classroom is averaged with the 10 in a special education classroom.  If only 12 students enroll in the high school calculus class apparently the engineer would combine them with the 12 taking French to avoid a lower student/teacher ratio.  Unlike his fantasy engineer world where every teacher and student would be interchangeable round pegs fitting into round holes, and you could discard the misfits, the real world and schoolhouses of public education have a lot of square pegs.  And here’s a late addition I thought of while driving back from the Capitol (grandchildren didn’t get to see him because it was so crowded we couldn’t get inside).  Particularly secondary schools are required by accreditation standards to have planning periods for a teacher.  So while you can count students as a 1 when dividing, teachers don’t have classes all day so they must be counted as a fraction.  If, for example, that fraction was 5/6 (one plan out of six periods), immediately the engineer’s 16.3 goes to 19.6.  As any engineer should know, “garbage in, garbage out”.  You can do the math correctly, but if it’s with the wrong numbers you get garbage for an answer.

The definition of a Teacher.   We all, of a certain age, remember the line “It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.”  Our engineer is in a jazz believing if he could exclude administrators from the definition of “teacher” when allocating funding for pay raises that would solve something.  He also alleges, “Oklahoma has had significant growth in administrative staffing that is much greater than the increase of student population.”  His allegation is true or false depending on the start and stop of your comparison.  Using the data reported by the Oklahoma Office of Accountability, the most recent fiscal year being 2016 and oldest 1999 available on their website, since 2002 student population grew 9.2% while administrative staff grew 13.2%; but since 2009 students grew 5.6% while administrators only 2.3%.  So what does he think that has to do with teacher pay raises?  I think, but am not sure, that if Strohm had his way, the amount of funding determined for a statewide teacher pay increase would not include compensation for administrators.  So either school boards would adjust teacher pay while leaving administrators’ compensation flat, or they would have to come up with the money on their own.  I suspect he thinks that would be an incentive to hire fewer administrators.  I expect that the approved teacher pay raise will be implemented in the same way the last one was in FY 2009 which I handled for a school district.  True, the amount statewide was totaled up according to a definition that included certified administrators, but that statewide amount was then dumped into the state aid formula where the money is paid out according to the number of weighted students served, not the number of adults employed.  The engineer should understand that does not reward an individual district for having more administrators or teachers.

Let’s do a little more math.  In 2016 statewide there were 3595 administrators, 516 school districts and 1761 school sites.  If we allow one superintendent for each district and one principal for each school site, then that accounts for all but 1318 administrators.  Eliminating those administrators would certainly free up enough funding for a $1000 pay raise, but not $2000; AND that assumes there are no assistant principals, no assistant superintendents and no athletics directors even in the largest districts.  Good luck selling that to school boards and the public.  Likely there are some administrative positions statewide that could be eliminated without impacting student safety and education.  I doubt it would pay for as much of a teacher pay raise as would going to a unicameral legislature.

Integrity – what are we teaching our children?   I can relate to Strohm’s Charlie Brown analogy with Lucy moving the football—that’s exactly how those of us responsible for managing school district budgets since 2009 have felt when faced with repeated “revenue failures”, partly caused by our “Lucy’s”, the legislators who believed the supply side economics nonsense that lowering taxes would increase state revenue.  This folly since the Great Recession has distinguished Oklahoma as the state with the largest reduction in state formula funding per student, a hole we may now climb out of in spite of the engineer wanting to dig it still deeper.

To paraphrase his query back at him, “I would like to ask our engineer legislator who voted for a teacher pay raise costing about $400 million, but didn’t support the tax increases needed to pay for it; what message are you teaching our children?  Is it OK to take credit for mandating a teacher pay raise, but not provide the funding to cover its cost?  Isn’t this the “essence of Socialism” that stems from a political culture of spending in an election year without any fiscal accountability.”

So what is the teacher walkout really all about?   Again, I agree that the teacher pay raise passed by the legislature, and funded without help from Representative Strohm, is historic and deserves to be celebrated.  All thanks to the 75%.

The battle is with the School Board and Superintendents, not the legislature.   Here’s an open invitation, I’ll sit with you to conduct an honest review of Oklahoma school finance data and will demonstrate that, short of laying off large numbers of teacher assistants, bus drivers and custodians, the only way to finance the teacher pay raise is with new revenue from the state.  Please stop claiming there is plenty of money in current school budgets for teacher pay raises and realize that your offered solutions simply do not add up. 

It’s time for REFORM.   There is always room for improvement and school districts can do a better job.  But the key to successful schools is having talented and dedicated educators and leadership in each and every school.  We have the best chance to employ effective teachers for our children if we can offer competitive compensation.  Changing the definition of “teacher” isn’t reform, nor is requiring expensive audits and transparency of financial records that are already open to the public; rather these are just more distractions from school districts’ core mission–and more talking points for a legislator who likely has little else to show for his time at the Capitol.  So I would say to his constituent, “Pray for a legislator who will take the time to understand basic school finance and who has the integrity to fund the spending he mandates.”

Here’s hoping the engineer gets to meet my grandchildren on Monday.  

As always lunch is on me to the first to ID the photo location.